Another Look at School Lunch Participation: Food Insecurity

We’re very fortunate in the U.S. to have high access to food and there are many social programs to help people who cannot afford food. That being said, food insecurity is still a problem for some families.

According to the USDA, “An estimated 85.1 percent of American households were food secure throughout the entire year in 2011, meaning that they had access at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life for all household members.”

I came across this data just after putting together my information on the National School Lunch Program and thought it would be interest to compare the two data sets. My hope was to see that states with more food insecurity would have more participation in the school lunch program.

This scatter plot compares lunch participation with food insecurity by state. The center of the graph is the national average. I chose to highlight the top left “danger zone” quadrant as these are the states with more food insecurity and less NSLP participation. You can mouseover any of the data points for the specifics of that state.

This is also my first time really getting into D3 so let me know if you have any feedback.